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I was talking with my buddy John Sundman about email and social media and email. He, like me, found that Facebook was useless as a sales medium and Twitter was worse than useless. I’ve had plenty of retweets from folks with more than a million followers and the sales results have been abysmal. In fact, the only surefire way of selling a book is via email. End of story.

John asked me a few questions: “How many people get it? What kind of response do you get when you send out a blast? What mailer tool do you use? How did you build up your mailing list? How long did that take?”Continue reading →

Every new endeavor requires a period of ascetic dedication. This is yours. Some writers make this their ceiling, but many make it their floor. Either way, you must produce on a daily basis. How do you do this? You can crank out, perhaps, three posts of a few hundred words each in the morning and three in the evening. Or you can write one big post. Either way, do the word count. Why is this important? Because if you have a goal, you can meet it. After his heart attack, blogging great Om Malik set this number for himself to ensure he produced quality content in a timely manner and did not kill himself in the process. Sadly, Om’s heart attack was brought on by the blogging lifestyle, as well as too much booze, cigars, family history, and bad luck. It took a massive change in his everyday life to reorient him toward a saner blogging schedule, and he found this 1,000-word limit invaluable.Continue reading →

I’ve been posting chapters from my new book, More Gods Than Men, on Amazon’s WriteOn. This invitation-only service is a sort of fiction workshop that allows folks to comment and edit books on the fly. The best thing is that I can give you guys access to the service now using the code V6BBECGE. Simply cut and paste that code into the box!

I was amazingly lucky to be able to talk to William Gibson, author of The Peripheral and a personal writing hero of mine. I’ve always loved his work and it was a real treat to be able to sit down with him. I love my job.

The old man thumbed his rosary and looked out at 8th Avenue and the river of trucks and bikes that passed. He was wearing a hooded jacket, old and grey at the edges, and his face was hidden under a soft plaid hunter’s hat. He leaned against the iron fence that protected the front door of his apartment building. It was here where the superintendent left the trash that stank all summer, forcing him to walk the three blocks to the park to the north where, until last year, he sat with his little dog. This summer she was too lame to climb down the stairs and he was to tired to walk without her so he was the only one who spent his time in this silent ministry in the stink of the garbage.Continue reading →

This is a true story. A few summers ago we bought an old house in Brooklyn from the estate of a woman who had passed. She had a Polish caretaker who was in the house when we visited a few times and she noticed that my wife was Polish and so they struck up a few conversations. One morning, as we were getting ready to sign the contract, the told us, adamantly and in Polish, that “No one ever died in this house.”

My favorite writing program, Scrivener, is one of the most powerful tools in my arsenal. But it’s a little daunting. If you look at it without knowing what to expect it’s actually quite scary and, because of that, many people think they have to “learn” it.Continue reading →

I rarely bring up good reviews here (mostly because I have so few) but I was tickled to see this great review of Mytro percolate up on my feed. The author put some time into it and for that I thank him/her. Take a gander:

“[When Vonnegut tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope] Oh, she says, well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is, is we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore.”
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Interview by David Brancaccio, NOW (PBS) (7 October 2005).
Kurt Vonnegut